A letter to my 18-year old self

Dear Dani,

This isn’t even on your radar. I know you’re not even thinking about turning 36. But here I am, 18 years later, a confident, well-adjusted woman, looking at you, a hurt 18-year old girl with promise, with a few words of advice as you go through the next 18 years of your life.

The thing is that you will always feel like you are 18. You will pinch your love handles and believe that you are in someone else’s body. You will begin to see more and more grey hair taking over when you are 34 and hope that if you pluck it, it won’t come back. You will drive up to the home you own, think about the three children inside and wonder what the hell happened.

You’ll long for the days when you had no responsibility and plan for the days when you can be free.

Maybe you’ll never be free again. But as you are raising your babies, don’t lose your adventurous spirit. You’re going to want to stay at home with them and you’ll long for nap time so that you can just take a moment. But if you stay at home all the time, you will lose yourself and feel trapped. You’re adventurous. A social one. Take the kids on walks, teach them to jump in puddles, show them that there is a big world out there.

Show them how to find the world. And show them how to find themselves in the world, too. Because after they play their last game when they are 18, you still want them to know who they are on the inside.

You’ll spend so much of your 20’s being defined by your successes and failures in sports. You won’t know who you until you’re about 30. But listen to me. You are not your mother. You’ll spend about five years wrapped up in your parallel stories and convince yourself that you are her. But you are not. You are a compassionate, patient, kind and giving person. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You’re someone special. And when you share yourself with others, you bring out the best in them, too.

At 18, you’ve already been hurt in ways that are hard to swallow. You don’t even understand the extent of it yet. There will be so many things that you never understand, and you’ll feel like you don’t know how to be a mother at all. But kids change you.

Right now, you think of love as this ooey gooey feeling you get when you think of someone you care about or see peanut butter. But love is so much more than an emotion. It’s a verb.

Children demand patience and kindness. They will make mistakes, and you have to be full of grace to not hold onto all the mistakes they make. Children will teach you understand a person in a way that you never have before and so every day you will want to meet them right where they are no matter what.

That is love. It’s full of grace and sacrifice. And love, my dear Dani, is not at all about you.

Once you erase what you know about love at 18 and learn how to extend it to your children, you’ll be able to extend it to other people, too. You’ll learn that it doesn’t matter whether you agree with another person’s choices or not because everyone is doing the best they can with what they have at that moment.

The truth is, everyone still feel like they are 18, too. No matter how old they get. Sure, they get fancier cars and make their own music choices, but every single person you meet and see want the same things you want: they want to belong, they want a voice and they want to be understood.

They may pretend like they want something else, but they don’t. When you learn to meet another person there, you are going to help them take the next steps in their life.

One day, you’re going to move away from Indiana to Illinois. I know. You would never be caught living in a state with a class system for basketball. You’re also going to hate the wide-open fields and you’ll think the people are pretentious. But in 10 years, when you have a chance to move back to Indiana, you won’t want to leave Illinois.

By that time, you’ll have opened your heart to people, and you’ll realize that life is less about where you are, but rather about who you’re with. Instead of spending so much time wanting to be in Indiana, maybe you could just be present and grateful where you are, no matter where life takes you.

Being present and grateful will bring you contentment. And that, my dear girl, is something you’ll never want to lose.

But you will lose it time and again. That’s how life goes. There are times when you don’t think anything will ever go wrong again. And then there will be times when you can’t see the light outside of the hole you’re in.

There is much heartache that awaits you. You going to go through time when you just want to crumble into yourself instead of face the day. But you’re strong, so you will face the day.

I know you think that feeling something is a weakness. But the truth is that facing your feelings is your greatest strength. It is only when you let yourself go through your emotions (even if you’re on the bathroom floor at your friend’s house with swollen eyes) that you’re able to move forward in the ways that you’re supposed to.

Anger is a disease. I have seen anger destroy more people than cancer, heart disease and car accidents. We just don’t take statistics on it. Don’t let anger rule your heart. It’s okay to be angry, but you have to cancel the debt. No one owes you anything. So. Cancel the debt.

And while your soul has been damaged, you’ve also done quite a bit of damaging, too. You’ve got a long list of things you regret doing, so apologize to those people. Some of them will accept it, some of them will want something more from you, some of them will not respond; but once you dig down in your heart and apologize to them, that’s the best you can do.

You’re going to have to forgive yourself, too, Dani. You carry around a tough exterior, but you are a tender girl who has a big heart. Once you realize that you’ve hurt people the way you have, you’re going to carry around a lot of guilt and shame. But guilt and shame are just dirty laundry. You can get cleaned up again.

Forgiveness is hard. And it takes time, but when you let things go, you will be so much happier.

You will also be so much happier when you do not rely on others to provide for you. You will spend so much of the next 14 years, waiting on someone else to have the answers for you, waiting for someone else to help you, waiting on someone else to _____________.

You, with all your promise, have two hands, two eyes, two feet. You will remain healthy through the next 18 years. And with that powerful brain you have, you can do things, too. You’ll read a book when you’re about 31 that will tell you that all women want a man to rescue them. It will say that all women want that fairytale story.

You’ve been raised on those stories by watching Disney movies, going to church or even by watching the codependent relationship of your parents. But the truth is that you, a woman, have the ability to knock things out of the park. You learned this when you played home run derby with the boys. You learned this when you could beat those boys on the basketball court.

You don’t need to be rescued because athletic skills are not the only skills you have. You are a creative person and a problem solver who is not afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes don’t mean you’re a failure, Dani. Failures are people who want something but they never try. Be proud of those mistakes because you will learn from them.

Dani Zell. When you are 36 years old, you will want to start your life all over again. You’ll think if you only knew at 18 what you knew now things would be so much more different. But they wouldn’t be any different. You’d still be the woman you are today because that’s who you have always been. You just didn’t know it yet.

I know you hope you can be reincarnated as a whale or go through the metamorphosis process of a butterfly, but all we know for sure is that we get this one life. We get one time. So, 18-year old Dani, don’t live with regrets. Build a life where you can keep exploring, where you can meet new people, where you can say that you gave all you could.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about what you received, but instead about what you could give to others. It doesn’t have to be a check or a meal all the time. The thing people want the most is to be understood. So give someone your time, your ear and your heart. I know you’ll want to give them the shirt off your back, but you can’t save anyone. You can just be their friend.

Your life is not over at 36. You’ll still have enough fire in you to want to conquer the next 53 years of your life. But by that point, you’ll understand that you aren’t just wandering through the wilderness. You will be ready to live with a unique purpose. You’re going to make it, Dani. Just hold on a little longer.

Love,
Dani